See, I really want to
list the two female leads of Rain Dogs
as ‘notable’, but I can’t remember their names…

On a technicality,
Wilson was also the first to draw the Traitor General – although he’s in
disguise in that story, or rather, he’s not wearing his classic ‘burned-up
villain’ face quite yet.

One of these men is a Souther Traitor! But the next time we see him, under the pen of Cam Kennedy, his face has been half burned off.Words by Gerry Finley-Day

Notable characteristics:

Grimaces. Cityscapes.
Characters running, jumping and vehicle-stunting into action. Incredibly crisp,
sharp and thin lines. Large blank spaces that are also filled with little tiny
details. Immaculate production design and costume design.

Something about the clean whites and thin lines makes this overpass look both futuristic and run-down. It certainly draws you into the world of Mega City 1.Words by Wagner and Grant

Nu Earth, on the other hand, is all hell all the time, the only relief from poison gas and empty wasteland being the burnt-out husks of military vehicles and bomb shrapnel.Words by Gerry Finley-Day

Gritted teeth and general grimacing.

You can practically see Dredd squishing up his face underneath his helmet.Words by John Wagner

On Colin:

Colin Wilson burst
onto the scene as one of the first wave of new artists helping to fill gaps
left by 2000AD’s ‘original artists’ (for want of a better term), who were
either slowing down or being given more and more work by American competitors.
Specifically, Wilson
began working on Dredd just as Mike
McMahon and Brian Bolland were doing their final episodes (for a long while,
anyway),

The shininess of Bolland meets the dynamism of Smith - move over, there's a new art droid in town!

and then took the baton from Dave Gibbons on Rogue Trooper.

Dunno what those robotic pointers do, but I bet it's nasty.

Of course, this tactic
didn’t work out too well for Tharg, as Wilson himself moved out of British
comics all too rapidly** (he was a bit good, after all), after being a steady
fixture for a mere hundred Progs. And that was the end of that – until incoming
Tharg Andy Diggle headhunted him to come back to the Prog twenty years later,
for a much longer stint.***

Anyway, let’s take a
look at Wilson’s
early work on a Future Shock...

Colin Wilson is one of the few who has drawn an honest-to-goodness 'trapped in a virtual reality prison' Future Shocks.Words by Kelvin Gosnell (one of the first Future Shocks writers, so he's allowed!)

...before moving to the main event, his explosive pencils on Judge Dredd .

More beautiful run-down future cityscapes. This one's right out of the Katsuhiro Otomo playbook, but this is like a year before he even started on Akira. SO MANY LITTLE LINES!Words by Wagner and Grant

The look of the man getting soused with acid has a real Euro comics feel to it, if you ask me.Words by Wagner and Grant

Shockingly good,
right? But the main things for me is that it added a layer of urban grit to
Mega City One that hadn’t quite been there before, in the whacked-out future
look from the really early Ezquerra images, to McMahon’s hyper-stylized
architecture. I suppose you could argue that Wilson’s MC1 is almost too close to real city
structures from the present day – a little more movie Dredd than comics Dredd.
But in the context of the rather old-fashioned Mega Rackets cycle, that actually fit pretty well.

Wilson’s people are great too. There’s the
down-at-heel look of the man visiting the body sharks, contrasted with the
intense craziness of the ‘mad citizen’ who just can’t take it any more.

You can just tell all those people haven't been able to buy new coats for ages - but how does Wilson do it?Words by Wagner and Grant

Behold the clenched fist of crazed righteousness!Words by Wagner and Grant

But even more than on
Dredd, Rogue Trooper is where Wilson really made his
mark. Dave Gibbons did so much to create the world and setting of Rogue Trooper, but most of his stories
took place out on the open wild of Nu Earth. Wilson had the chance to put Rogue in
different contexts, including military HQs, satellites, and on tour of
battlefronts.

Dig those shards of shattered glass.Words by GF-D

Bold use of deep black shadows, wicked.Words by GF-D

The details on that marauder outfit is exactly why I loved Star Wars figures as a child. It's just cool.Words by GF-D

Crazy big future war guns! Secret bases with lots of little boxes and lines on them! It's cool!Words by GF-D

Rogue proved too
popular a strip to allow any one artist to do the job, so Wilson rotated with a solid team including
cam Kennedy and Mike Dorey, but he felt like the series’ main artist after
Gibbons left.

Specifically, tackling
what you might call the ‘myth-arc’**** of Rogue
Trooper, where he almost catches up with the Traitor General (Marauders being the best of that sequence), or the
long-form rollercoaster of All Hell on
the Dix-1 Front (although he didn’t quite manage all 12 episodes himself),
an action romp that feels as if it's telling part of the wider story of the Nort-Souther war, complete with an untrustworthy female lead.

Swoopy hair to rival Alan Davis!Words by GF-D

But it was not to
last! I don’t know what happened, but I can only assume that Wilson found more profitable work at that
point, and may never have been seen in these parts again…

…if it weren’t for
incoming assistant editor Andy Diggle, some 15 or so years later, who set about
finding this lost favourite, and putting him to work as much as he could, on Dredd, on one-off delights, on the
latest version of Rogue, and even on
his own all-new series, Rain Dogs.

Also, some Pulp Sci-Fi, back when Tharg was trying
that thing of doing Future Shocks that
weren’t required to be defined by their twist endings. I suppose the major
selling point of the series was to have super SF-y Science Fiction, as in
proper futuristic spaceships and such. As someone with a gift for environments
and hardware, Colin Wilson was a good fit, although I have to say it struck me
that leaning too much on this end of his work revealed that he’s actually much
better as selling emotions with his people, even if he uses their environments
to help communicate said emotions.

The spaceship design is classic Wilson, but the space setting, immersive as it is, doesn't quite have the intensity of classic Wilson.Words by Robbie Morrison

Always fun to see an artist tackle a character they're not normally associated with.Wilson's Nemesis is way more Redondo than O'Neill, for both good and ill.

Phase 2 Colin Wilson
has to deal with colour, at a time when digital colouring was the way to go,
but at a moment in time when it hadn’t quite got really good yet.

Perhaps as a result of
this, Wilson’s return to Judge Dredd
didn’t have quite the same impact as those earlier efforts. The grimaces are
all present and correct, but the backgrounds don’t have the same lived-in feel.
Maybe it’s just that the Mega City One of this era was a shinier place, or that
these stories were more about the upmarket ends of town, as opposed to the
seedy parts where one might go to find an organ legger.

Keep those teeth clenched tightly, Joe!

Such an awesome angle to show flying cars chase in a future city.Words by Robbie Morrison

More Manga by way of Euro-comics set design amazingness.Words by Robbie Morrison

There's fun in Wilson's giant monster design, but it's not quite at the level of his technological stuff.Words by Robbie Morrison

Grizzled men fighting smooth-skinned ladies.Words by John Wagner

Wilson, deservedly,
had a key slot in the major epic of the era, Doomsday. There’s some robot rampage action,

but, more importantly,
there’s some political machinations involving Volt, Herhsey and the ever
unpleasant Jura Edgar.

Hershey and Edgar, head to head. More expert use of negative space.Words by John Wagner

Rain Dogs makes the best of a slightly washed out look, suggesting a world that
is faded compared to our own. I really want Rain
Dogs to be better than it is, but there’s not quite enough going on. The
characters are fine, the setting is excellent, and the art sufficiently moody,
but it’s all a little too by the numbers grim action movie stuff, down to the
perma-scowls.

The sky is pretty key to this post-apocalyptic society.Words by Gordon Rennie

Also crossbows.Words by Gordon Rennie

No nonsense meet-cutes in Rain Dogs.Words by Gordon Rennie

Tor Cyan was a definite step up in ‘nu-Wilson’ terms – perhaps he has some
strange affinity for war-torn alien planets, and burnt-out super soldiers?

Fittingly, Wilson’s
last outing for the Prog was a) written by Andy Diggle, and b) a return to the
world of classic Rogue Trooper, I imagine still the strip the artist is most
strongly associated with in the minds of readers (even if, technically, he drew
more episodes of Dredd overall. Just.)

This was some three
years after he’d been a regular feature of the Prog and Meg, a little hit of
nostalgia called What if Gunnar had
survived the Quartz Zone Massacre? – basically, a one-off showing what
early Rogue Trooper strips might’ve been like if the leads character had been a
trigger-happy psycho. Wilson plays ball,
combining his newer way of drawing faces with his classic black and white super
detailed costume work.